Overview

"cPRO" (http://cprohealth.org) isUniversity of Washington-developed, open-source software for"computerized patient-reported outcomes." cPRO projects together comprise a series of flexible web-based, interactive, domain-specific health assessments and interventions, built on a common platform developed to support research projects over the last decade. Our efforts have led to the development of a platform that is unique in meeting the needs of patients, clinicians and researchers. Over 30 cPRO systems have been deployed for use by clinical and research teams in the US and internationally.

cPRO software began within Dr. Donna Berry's "Distributed Health Assessment and Intervention Research" (DHAIR) program of patient-clinician communication research in oncology. DHAIR uses cPRO combined with content specific to oncology including: assessment and intervention content, workflows to support patient centered administration and to support integration in the clinical oncology setting, and formal usability testing of both the patient and clinician experiences.

cPRO consists of the following two components:

Open-source Survey Platform: a web-based, interactive, database-driven, extensible survey and response framework used by these projects. This platform has served a broad array of clinical research and usual-care projects at institutions around the world.

Open-source Survey Administration Management: the methods and procedures by which the survey software is implemented and deployed to accommodate specific patient, clinic and research workflows, and by which the results integrated into clinical care and/or research in any particular project setting.

cPRO systems combine these components with domain-specific content, which can be public domain, licensed, and/or proprietary, and is often implemented with additional coding/enhancements. Content may include survey question and answer text,
branching decisions, tailored interventional content that is delivered
based on business rules driven by the research aims, clinician tools
(e.g., graphical summaries), and patient tools (e.g., teaching tips and
charts). cPRO is written specifically to support the reuse of content across implementations. Proprietary content used in cPRO applications is not distributed as part of the open source code base, but non-proprietary content (eg., creative commons or public domain survey questions) may be distributed for reuse.